Emoji Usage in Email Marketing: Do’s and Don’ts

Digital marketing has many great methods of brand promotion. New tactics emerge each year and marketers have a plethora of ways to increase brand awareness. However, email campaigns still generate the best results and have the highest conversion rate. Almost all companies use this tool in everyday business but that is also the reason why it is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from the bunch of competitors.

This is exactly where emojis come into play. Marketers use emojis to differentiate their email messages and attract customers who wouldn’t notice them otherwise. But you can’t just add a random emoji to the email subject line and expect to skyrocket conversions. In this article, we will show you the basic principles of emoji usage in email marketing and its do’s and don’ts.

Why Use Emojis in Email Subject Lines?

According to Merriam Webster, Emoji is a small image, symbol, or icon used in text fields in electronic communication to express the emotional attitude of the writer. This means that emojis express the very nature of your business. Not so long ago, it used to be exclusively an element of colloquial speech and interpersonal communication as a study proved that more than 90% of digital population use emojis.

Companies became aware of this trend recently and started using emojis as part of their own Business-to-Customer communication. They use it to address potential consumers more naturally, having in mind the following benefits:

1. Emojis grab readers’ attention ❤

People are visual beings and it’s easier to grab their attention using images than plain text. If you use the right emoji at the right moment, you can expect an email to produce much better results than usual.

2. Increased brand awareness 🌟

A lot of world-known brands like Pepsi, McDonald’s, aEmoji-Report-ReturnPathnd Domino’s Pizza already designed their own special emojis. It increases brand awareness because it makes people notice you even if they don’t want to read your emails.

3. Saves crucial space and time 🕗

An average email subscriber is not much of a reader. When you add an emoji to the subject line, you save yourself space and save your subscribers time they take to read the headline. It’s simply a win-win situation for both parties.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Emoji in Email Marketing Campaigns

Emojis can give extra power to your email marketing but they can also become counterproductive in case you don’t prepare a good strategy. That’s why it is important to know the do’s and don’ts of this marketing tool.

The Do’s of emoji usage:

1. Align emojis with brand image

There are 2,666 emojis in the Unicode Standard as of June 2017 but it doesn’t mean that you have to use every single one of these symbols to advertise your brand. On the contrary, you should use only those emojis that fit your brand image and the values it represents. For instance, if you target students and high school kids, it is alright to use funny icons. But if you want to send a message of professional authority, don’t add the poop emoji to the subject line.

2. Test in samples

Emojis don’t have the same kind of productivity in each campaign. For this reason, you should choose sample audience and test it on a 50/50 basis. Send text-only emails to half of this group and emoji-based messages to another half. If results turn out to be good, you are free to send emojis to all the subscribers.

3. Send it when it means something

Pointless emojis will probably make receivers unsubscribe from your mailing list. You need to choose the topic wisely and be precise with your timing to fully grasp the potential of these symbols. For example, according to a research report by Return Path, emails with an Irish flag emoji had a read rate of 27% prior to St. Patrick’s Day, which is 8% more than non-emoji emails. That’s what we call a well-planned emoji.

4. Put it at the beginning of the subject line

Most devices don’t display long headlines, so your subscribers can see only around 40 characters. You should pay attention to this fact and try to put emojis at the beginning of the subject line. This way, emojis will be the first thing users will notice, which was your idea in the first place.

The Dont’s of Email Marketing:

1. Emoji overuse

Okay, you’ve probably figured out the magic of emoji usage in email marketing by now. However, it doesn’t give you the right to add these symbols to all of your emails. Such tactic would be counter-effective and you could start losing subscribers soon enough. Instead, try to be analytical about it and exploit emojis only when you are sure it won’t hurt the brand image.

2. Avoid testing

Emoji testing is a two-fold process. It serves to check the effectiveness of this method but it also has the purpose to eliminate technical barriers. Different devices recognize emojis in many different ways and you need to test each email to make sure that they won’t appear as random letters or meaningless images.

3. Forget to analyze competitors

Sometimes you will come up with the perfect emoji-based email marketing idea and work hard to put it into practice, but only to find out that your competitor did exactly the same thing a few weeks ago. It won’t only be the waste of time but also a professional embarrassment. Therefore, you need to monitor your competitors’ campaigns and see what you should and should not do with emojis in email marketing.

Conclusion:

Using emojis in email subject lines can drastically increase your campaign productivity. However, it is not easy to come up with the best solution in all situations and you need to make sure that emojis match your style and the overall marketing strategy. In this article, we showed you the most important do’s and don’ts of emoji usage in email marketing. Keep our tips in mind and let us know in comments if you have more suggestions to share with our readers.

This was a guest article by Warren, a marketing enthusiast and a blogger at Best Essays, who loves music. If he doesn’t have a guitar in his hands, he’s probably embracing new technologies and marketing techniques online!

Abhishek Raj is the Chief Editor at Budding Geek. He is an inveterate blogger carrying almost 6 years of experience in the online media industry. Abhishek takes pride on being featured in some of the top industry websites like Marketing Land, Social Media Today, LifeHacker, Business2Community and ProBlogger.
Read more about Abhishek and his blog

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